[This book review was published in the Middle American
News, March 2002; and The St. Croix Review, April 2002, pp. 59-62.]

The Death of the
West

Patrick J.
Buchanan

St. Martin's Press, 2002

Is
it possible simultaneously to be a successful political figure, aspiring to the
presidency of the United States, and at the same time a serious writer on
social and cultural issues?The
question almost answers itself. Those who have read Patrick Buchanan's books
know that he certainly is a serious writer.What is doubtful is whether honest and open thinking isn't inherently a
disqualification for political success."Truth-telling" would lead to popularity only in a world where
truth is valued above special interests and above the desire people have to the
confirmed comfortably in the views they already hold.

Here,
fortunately, we are concerned not with Buchanan the politician, but with
Buchanan the philosopher and social critic.

The
significance of Buchanan's writing stems in large part from the topics he
chooses.He doesn't shy away from any
subject he considers vital to the well-being or survival of Western
civilization or its American derivative.His recent book A Republic, Not an Empire (reviewed in these
pages in the Summer 2000 issue) explored the risks of the United States'
self-proclaimed mission in world affairs (since the great turn-about of 1898)
"to make everybody's business our business."The danger of a well-intended
interventionism was made crystal clear by the horrors of September 11.A world-wide Social Gospel sought to be
impressed by a powerful nation manages to incur much resentment and fierce
animosity.

That
book is now followed by The Death of the West, which has perhaps an even
more sweeping vision.Buchanan makes a
powerful case that the West is permitting itself to die.Like the exoskeleton of a dead or dying
insect, the corpus of the old civilization is coming to be occupied by new
life: a multicultural, heavily Third World population.Already, the West is much different than it
was even so recently as forty years ago; in the near future, it will be hard to
recognize, except by the remains of its historic architecture.

Buchanan's
discussion centers on several "clear and present dangers" to the
survival of Western civilization (which are in addition to the danger from
world interventionism he described in his preceding book):

1.
A radical decline of the existing population.A drastic decline in population through aging, mortality and a
far-below-replacement birthrate is occurring everywhere in the West except in
Muslim Albania. Whereas demographic experts say that there needs to be an
average 2.1 children per woman for a people simply to maintain its existing
population, fertility rates in Western countries have fallen well below this
for several years.The number is now
1.4 for European women in general.Without immigration, Europe's population is expected to fall from the
present 728 million to 600 million in fifty years."Of Europe's 47 nations, only one, Muslim Albania, was, by
2000, maintaining a birthrate sufficient to keep it alive indefinitely."

Buchanan
gives the following statistics by country: He says that Australia's birthrate
is "below replacement," but he doesn't cite a figure.Germany, 1.3 for the past ten years.Great Britain, 1.66. Italy, 1.2.Russia, 1.17.(Russia's President Putin is prompted by this to warn his
countrymen that "if the present tendency continues, there will be a threat
to the survival of the nation." It is worth noting that Russia will over
time be subject to increasing pressure from the burgeoning populations of the
Muslim countries to its south and of China.Millions of Chinese are already settling in Siberia, radically changing
the demographics of that vast expanse.)Spain has the lowest birthrate with 1.07.Even Japan, not a Western power but one of the advanced
societies, is among the nations with a below-replacement birthrate.Buchanan says, "she, too, has begun to
die.Japan's birthrate is half what it
was in 1950."

Buchanan,
taking a long view, is no doubt right about the danger this poses to the West.Nevertheless, the projected 600 million for
2050 is still considerably larger than the population of Europe was through
most of its history.Taken just by
itself, the decline in population, which is not necessarily subject to
extrapolation into the indefinite future, does not deprive the civilization of
the people it needs to exist and to thrive.The danger would seem to come, instead, from the combination of this
decline with the second factor Buchanan discusses: the enormous demographic
invasion that the rapid influx of immigrants from the Third World
represents.Europe, the United States
and Australia have for a third of a century allowed a vast wave of Third World
immigration, some of it "legal" and some "illegal."

2.
A host of people from different cultures, and a regnant ideology of
"multiculturalism."Buchanan tells how "mass immigration has already begun.In [the single year of] 2000, England took
in 185,000 immigrants, a record.In
1999 [again, a single year], 500,000 illegal aliens slipped into the European
Union, a tenfold increase from 1993."At the same time, the United States insists on the admission of Turkey
to the EU, a membership that would allow its citizens to migrate throughout Europe.It is no wonder that Buchanan says "the
day of Europe is over... As their populations become more Arabic and Islamic,
paralysis will set in."

In
the United States, there have been "waves of Mexican immigrants"
since the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965.The threat Buchanan sees from this does not result from some
narrow xenophobia, or from an animus against the immigrants as human beings,
but from the danger that is posed to the continuity of American civilization:
"Unlike the immigrants of old, who bade farewell forever to their native
lands when they boarded the ship, for Mexicans, the mother country is right
next door.Millions have no desire to
learn English or to become citizens.America is not their home; Mexico is; and they wish to remain proud
Mexicans."He observes that
"with their own radio and TV stations, newspapers, films, and magazines,
the Mexican Americans are creating an Hispanic culture separate and apart from
America's larger culture.They are
becoming a nation within a nation."There is even a movement called "the reconquista" that
aspires to a separate "mestizo nation."

This
is reenforced by the ideology that the American Left, dominant within American
institutions and followed implicitly by the professional classes, has embraced
since World War II.This ideology
marries the alienation of the American "intelligentsia" to every
unassimilated or disaffected group, replacing the "Old Left's"
desired marriage of the intelligentsia with the "proletariat."The resulting "multiculturalist"
ideology is advanced under the name of the traditional American ideals of
equality-before-the-law and of the dignity of each individual person, and thus
has had an irresistible moral appeal, but has been far more than that.The result has been what both sides call
"the culture war." In the
struggle over the soul of America, the majority becomes increasingly dispirited
and confused, while year by year the Left is strengthened by the rapidly
changing demographics.

3. The destruction of American memory; an "adversary
culture" at war with mainstream American society.Buchanan gives considerable attention to the
culture-war for its own sake.By
itself, it would be changing the face of America even in the absence of
reenforcement from the demographic revolution.

He
gives the clearest explanation I have seen of the more recent roots of the
adversary culture as they are found in the "Frankfurt School" made up
of the leftist theoreticians Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Theodor Adorno,
Herbert Marcuse and their followers.This school has been central to the Left's "march through the
institutions" of Europe and the United States.The Left has come to occupy virtually all the West's
opinion-forming high ground.The
remainder of the population – hundreds of millions of people – occupy a silent
majority with little voice and only relatively inaudible whimpers of protest.

A
criticism of Buchanan's explanation, which centers on those particular
thinkers, would be, of course, that the intellectual and cultural
"march" through the institutions of an otherwise
"bourgeois" civilization has been going on for much longer than the
explanation suggests.The Frankfurt
School is simply a highly influential twentieth century manifestation of it.It can be traced back as far as Rousseau in
the mid-eighteenth century.In his
prize-winning essay on The Origins of Inequality, Rousseau declared his
alienation from all advanced civilization, saying that private property is the
root of most if not all social evil.Rousseau has had tens of thousands of followers in the literary-artistic
subculture during the ensuing 250 years.This became especially evident with the rise of the world Left beginning
in approximately 1820.The alienated
critique of "bourgeois culture" has provided the steady drumbeat of
modern art, literature and ideology.(This is not to say that that is all there has been; a great many
creative people have worked outside its channel; but it has been a movement of
vast and varied dimensions, constituting one of the major forces in modern life.)

The
condition of the existing culture in the West as Buchanan describes it,
although in no way exaggerated, would befit Jonathan Swift's description of his
fictional Yahoos.He speaks of "a
popular culture that is saturated with raw sex and trumpets hedonistic
values," and says "the moral code... has been overthrown.The culture is dying."(The preference for sexually explicit
movies, television and dress is often attributed to the preferences of the
young, but it is worth observing how shallow that explanation is.The very young don't write the screenplays
or the scripts for TV sitcoms; nor do they set the fashions that are marketed
in the stores and trumpeted in commercials.Adults do those things, and it is adults who are choosing
to take the culture in those directions.)

Those
who think only in secular terms will tend to downplay it, but to Buchanan the
attack on Christianity as the fundamental core of Western civilization looms is
a fact of major importance.He speaks
of "the de-Christianization of the West."Moral relativism has taken the place of a fixed moral code based
on religious belief.Buchanan is
perhaps best known to people who have not read his books for his opposition to
abortion and championing of Christian belief.There is no question but that this informs his outlook.The Death of the West has much to
say, however, to Christian and secularist alike.

This
review has highlighted Buchanan's main themes.The book itself, of course, is recommended for a much more thorough discussion.